Virgin Immaculate

December 8th

We saw posters up around the town advertising, in Corsican, some kind of celebration for 'la festa di a nazione'. It is held on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, because in 1735, they chose the Immaculate Virgin as protectress of the island. I wonder whether getting the big guns out in the patron saint business (Mary, St Peter…) caused problems when going to war with someone who had adopted the same saint. Maybe having someone with awesome, universal power was worth it. The alternative, choosing someone genuinely linked to the place, probably would have posed problems too – a showdown between some dodgy local saint and the mother of God wouldn’t have inspired that much confidence.

Me and Lija went down to the church at seven, and found the mass still going on with the doors open, despite the cold, and people spilling out onto the steps, chatting and smoking. I started talking to one of my students and asked him to tell us what was going to happen. He gave us a long and garbled description of how they would carry God out, and how his dad was one of the people carrying him, except some years he didn’t if he had a bad back, and how there was blood on God’s head and hands and feet and side, but it wasn’t real, they drew it on with felt tip. He was very excited to be explaining everything to these strange ignorant foreigners, and took us into the church to see the statues, explaining how there were lots of photos of when they killed God, and how a statue showing John the Baptist baptising Christ was John helping his friend who had ‘mal au cœur’ (Jesus had his hand on his chest). It was terribly endearing, and made me wonder about how little children experience religion – it is such an epic fairytale to them, with love and tragedy and sacrifice.

Eventually the mass ended and a column of men in white robes with little capes in red, or green, or purple, filed out singing. It wasn’t God that they carried out, but Mary, a statue in painted wood with her outstretched arm holding a dangling rosary and an arch of lilies above her head. The men carrying her had leather slings like shoulder holsters, and one was so frail I thought he might fall down the church steps, but the others supported him as well as the statue. We filed after them into the windswept square and down towards the supermarket. It was strange to see teachers, students, the cleaning ladies from school, all these people from day to day life, in such a different situation. The little streets that we walk down every day to get to the bank or the shops seemed transformed with hundreds of people shuffling along singing and praying.

We stopped for prayers by the supermarket, under olive, clementine and palm trees hung with electric snowflakes swinging wildly in the wind. Then back into the main square, under strings of silver lights and the Christmas greeting in Corsican, ‘Pace e Salute’ with the moor’s head between the two. We walked out towards the sea, and stopped by the crib scene on a street corner to pray for sailors. I don’t know why Mary is called the Star of the Sea – is it just because of the similarity between Mare and Maria? At each stop, the men around the statue would strike up the same Latin hymn, which had the same keening harmonies as the Corsican polyphony we have heard.

The centre of Ile Rousse is tiny, so we were soon back at the church where more prayers were said, and they sang Dio vi salvi Regina, the national hymn of Corsica. The acoustic is good, and the song was so beautiful. It sounds like a love song, a lament, and a call to arms at the same time, and comes to these swift, sweet resolutions again and again, but breathlessly continues. When it was over we queued up to touch the statue’s feet, and a little scuffle broke out among some old women, who were admonishing those who took the flowers out of Mary’s garland.

Afterwards, we went down to the market, which is like a Greek temple but made in wood with a tiled roof, where food had been laid on by the mairie. For a while we gorged ourselves on the free beignets au brocciu, little doughnuts stuffed with brocciu, the sweetish sheep’s milk cheese they make here, which is something like ricotta. There was cheese bread too, and wine, but although I had already had supper I had to invest ten euros to try the full meal that was on offer. They had a little barbeque where they were grilling figatellu, the famous pork liver sausage which I have heard so much about, and in a high sided pot over a gas burner a man was using what looked like a broom handle to pound something mysterious. The figatellu, served like a hotdog in a baguette, was like the most salty, fatty, delicious sausage, and it turned out that the pot was full of polenta made with chestnut flour. They turned the brown paste out into a white sheet on a table, and the man wrapped it up and hugged it tenderly to him like a child. When it was firm, he unpeeled it from the cloth like an enormous plum pudding, dusted it with more flour, and started hacking off chunks for the eager crowd that had gathered. It was naturally sweet, warm and claggy, good with the hot sausage oozing its salty fat, and the slices of fresh cheese they were serving. I couldn’t finish my huge piece, and on the advice of several sage Corsican men I took it home for breakfast. Apparently you can either eat it cold with milk, or form it into a patty and dry fry it, which is what I did. With some fig and walnut jam, it was very nice second time round, with a sweet, smoky, nutty flavour.

It seemed as if the whole town had turned out, and many people from the surrounding villages too. I suppose the ceremony has the double appeal of Catholicism and nationalism, and we were button-holed late in the evening by Pierre, a teacher at the lycée, about Corsica’s political problems, the years of depopulation and huge losses in the second world war, the influx of radicalised Corsican students who had studied on the continent in the 60s and who fuelled the nationalist revival, the political infighting and deaths in Ile Rousse’s town square in the 90s, and the current appeals to dissuade speculation by restricting large purchases of land to people who have lived on the island for several years. I had worried that foreigners wouldn’t be welcome at a celebration of Corsican identity but, despite some curious looks, people were friendly and welcoming, especially since most of the children there knew me and came up to say hello. I got quite merry on the wine, despite the huge quantity of starch and fat which I managed to consume, and went home very happy.

Festivity

December 3rd

It snowed last night on the mountains and on my walk to school I looked out on the white peaks framed by the palm trees in the main square. They have put up silver lights in the trees outside my window, and today some men with a cherry-picker were wrapping lights round the palms. Ile Rousse is looking festive: the plane trees have their spiky little baubles, like ferrero rochers, and the clementine trees their beautiful orange fruits.

Advertising

December 2nd

Having so far failed to make any Corsican friends in Ile Rousse, I’m watching a lot of French telly, which is frequently surreal. My current favourite adverts are:

A jelly which inexplicably sings in English ‘Mr Jelly, flashy, Mr Jelly, funny!’, neither of which are valid attributes for a gelatin-based dessert.

A computer game called ‘les lapins crétins’, just because I like the word cretin.

An advert for dairy products in which the skeletons of the three little pigs, wearing paper pig masks and speaking with the creepy voices of small children, launch a ninja style attack on the big bad wolf and then get showered with milk from the udders of a giant cow.

Stella

November 30th

I spent the weekend in Corte with Emily, who was very tolerant of my incessant need to talk to people on skype, unaccustomed as I am to internet facilitated communication. She had spotted signs for a Christmas market and we invited Mathieu, one of the boys I met at Victoria’s party, along with us. We had visions of mulled wine and gingerbread, but it turned out to be a jumble sale in a prefab hut some way outside the city. For 3 euros I bought what looks to be a terrible novel about mystical 11th century treasures buried under Jerusalem, and a pair of dangly earrings for pierced ears, which I don’t yet have.

Afterwards, Mathieu drove us up to Tralonca, his family’s village where he has spent every summer. It was perched in the hills above Corte, and as we drove in we passed the old stone houses, square and windowless, that now house the animals. Mathieu told us about his childhood there, how the children used to build little villages in the same style out of pebbles, play human tetris, and lie in the road looking at the stars. There are no villages in sight of Tralonca, just wooded hillsides, it must be black as black at night. There is a yellow and white church with two bells, and a bar, A Stella, and a fountain which the villagers drink from, but which Mathieu advised me to avoid as my stomach probably wasn’t up to it. Everyone knew him, and spoke in Corsican, and his family have been there for three hundred years.

We walked out to the village cemetery, to a little chapel where apparently a priest was shot some time in the 19th century for starting mass before all the locals had arrived. If I understood correctly, they found the bullet stuck in the altar. Mathieu checked that his family graves were clean, and we walked back through the chestnut lined road to the car. We met a little boy on the way and when Mathieu asked him if he wanted to walk back with us, he said he was waiting for his father to get the cows in. We heard sporadic shouts in Corsican, and dogs barking in the woods, and then a line of cows filed out along the ridge above us, silhouetted against the blue sky. The boy passed us, grinning and clinging to his dad’s waist on a clapped out motorbike.

The next day we helped Stella, another person I met at Victoria’s party, to write a presentation for her English business studies class about an imaginary product, the BeepBang, which locates your keys by making them beep. Many astronomical puns ensued. I didn’t intend the weekend to be all about stars, and the old and the new, but there you are.

Hunter-gathering

November 22nd

Appetites whetted by the sea urchin Pierrot had given us on a kayaking trip, me and Lija embarked on our own echinoderm killing spree one weekend. We walked along the railway lines, which is the only way to get to the bay west of Ile Rousse by foot, and stopped at the first pebbly beach. We had asked Rafaël along, but he proved disappointingly squeamish when he realised that we really did intent to stab, crack open and disembowel sea creatures, and went off to read some Spanish novel on a rock.

Undeterred, me and Lija waded in and began the hunt. For obvious spine-related reasons you can’t get a firm grip on a sea urchin, so once they are firmly stuck to a rock it is hard to catch one. Several times I accidentally cracked them open with the knife I was using to prise them off the rocks and their entrails seeped out in a dark cloud and floated around my ankles. We did eventually gather about six of them, and they sat forlornly waving their spines, awaiting their fate.

We had vaguely seen what Pierrot had done to them on the first expedition, but he had tactfully got rid of the guts before giving us the edible parts, so the first urchin was a shock. They have a frightening fanged mouth, and are full of gritty brown slime and mucus the colour of liver. Underneath all that, once they have been rinsed out in the sea, is a surprisingly beautiful five pointed star of bright orange flesh. It has the texture of a smooth mousse, not chewy or grainy at all, and tastes of salty fishiness. We spread them on baguette, and then dried off while reading our books in the sun.

Bobbing Along

November 19th

Like teaching, I have been sailing every week but haven’t really written about it, because it is pretty repetitive. The sailing club is open on Saturdays and Wednesdays, and me and Lija go out in ‘funboats’, which are tiny yellow plastic things with lurid fuschia sails, or in catamarans with someone competent to take charge, or we go kayaking if there is no wind. The weather has been amazing, and it is so exhilarating to scud along in the sunshine, being drenched with salt water, and to see the mountains topped with snow above the town. Apart from a minor mishap involving me tearing a hole in a wetsuit while trying in vain to get it to accommodate my thighs, we have been doing pretty well. Recently, there hasn’t been much wind, so we have taken the kayaks out to chase cormorants or fish for edible sea urchins.

The ile rousse has a collection of little rocky islands to navigate around and cliffs to jump off for the more adventurous. The adrenaline junkies include the teenage boys from the sailing club and Lija, rather than me. I have been swimming though, although the water is chilly now that it’s the end of November. One week the sailing instructor, Pierrot, who is friendly and leathery and reassuringly knowledgeable about the sea, dropped us off on one of the little islets and we scrambled around on it. It is bare orange rock, so covered in guano that I thought there was some sort of white quartz mixed in with the other stone. The seabirds leave piles of fruit stones and tiny white snails in sheltered places.

Although I say it is repetitive, the sea is completely different each time. Today we finally had some wind and the water was slate blue. Once we left the harbour’s shelter the big waves rolled around the island, bucking our little plastic boats about, and the breeze ruffled the water so that it looked as if it was pocked by raindrops.

The best day so far was a kayak trip when the sea was eerily calm. Sea kayaking is strange because you are so close to the water and can see to the bottom where shoals of silver fish hang above the sand, almost motionless. I always feel very small on the empty sea, with the huge sky above, almost as if I can see the curve of the earth. Anyway, that day the water was like some other substance, a silvery gel rather than a liquid, and not a single wave. It looked computer generated. So we paddled out and Pierrot spotted some dolphins a little way out to sea, and we went after them as quietly as we could, trying not to let the paddles knock against the hull. We came close enough to see them very clearly. There were three of them, chasing the tiny fish that leap out of the water. The dolphins puffed out their clouds of breath and we followed them until they disappeared.

Meteorology

Every Monday, a teacher from the village school in Monticello picks me up and drives me up the hill for the afternoon classes. We usually manage to talk about the weather for ten whole minutes, thanks to the innately interesting nature of Corsican weather and the natural weather-chat gifts of English people. She always says that she couldn’t stand to live in Paris, with the low grey sky for months on end. Here, with the mountains so close to the sea, it is always changing. After a whole day of rain yesterday, the sky began to clear and the view down to the sea was so beautiful that I got distracted from teaching and just stared at it. Against the charcoal of the storm clouds, the sun lit up the new white clouds in pink and gold. The sea was deep indigo, striped with silver below the patches of clear sky. Later on I walked home, and the neon lights of the shops matched the pastel pink, baby blue sunset.

Chestnuts and Clementines

After Corte, I spent four nights in Bastia with some of the assistants there. Bastia is a somewhat unlovely city on the north-east coast of the island, looking across the sea to Italy. Maria, a Lebanese-American girl who has spent the past couple of years teaching in Korea, introduced us to gnocchi with sage butter and parmesan and a bud of Chinese flower tea which unfurled like an anemone. I introduced Ellen, an American from New England whose family farms Jersey cows, to cooking with garlic, and spent a whole day reading Harry Potter in French with her on the beach. Helen, a very sweet and softly-spoken girl from Nottingham, introduced me and Lija to singing Corsican polyphony when we went along to her choir. It was a roomful of old ladies, led by a voluptuous woman with a huge, raucous, mellow voice. Apparently she is quite famous in Corsica. We had the words, and followed as well as we could with the unfamiliar pronunciations and intervals and strange close harmonies that almost grate. At one point a woman said that the English girls were singing better than the Corsicans! I wish there was a choir in Ile Rousse, or even just bars where men will casually start playing traditional music, like I’ve seen in Corte.

The next day, some teachers from Helen’s school invited her chestnut picking, and she very kindly let me tag along. We drove out of the city into the hills, stopping on the way to buy Corsican clementines and huge, succulent muscat grapes. From the winding road you could see down to sea, past the chestnut forests and little villages perched on peaks, where the haze made the sky bleed into the water so that there was barely a horizon. We went out with baskets to gather chestnuts, discarding those with little holes. I thought that they were from dormice, but apparently flies lay eggs on the chestnut blossom, and they become worms inside the nuts and burrow out. There were wild boar tracks by the road, where they had been foraging like us.

The teachers, two couples and another man, were very welcoming and warm. We sat round the table drinking red wine, shelling chestnuts and shovelling them down our throats. One of the woman had an adorable adopted baby from Cambodia called Titine, which is a Corsican pet name for Clementine. The children watched Wall-E, and the adults had a heated and linguistically unsuccessful debate about the veil. Everyone disagreed with me and Helen, and my French just isn’t up to constant interruptions. It is hard to defend any argument when you can’t conjugate verbs. Obviously, I knew that many French people had strong opinions on laïcité, but I wasn’t prepared for the personal affront these men seemed to feel when someone wore a religious symbol. One man seemed outraged that he had been sold stamps in England by a Sikh with a turban, and both said that they could never tolerate one of their students wearing the veil. One of them told an involved story about how pork had been banned completely at a school canteen, because Islamic extremists were intimidating less observant Muslim students who ate it. He was incensed by this, but thanks to my terrible French and possibly the innately dubious nature of arguments by analogy, I failed to convince him that banning the veil might a similar over-reaction. They were similarly unconvinced by our suggestion that any Muslim women could make an informed decision to wear the veil for their own reasons, rather than because of intimidation by male clerics or family members. I hadn’t realised how vitriolic this debate could get – they seemed personally offended by the sight of these women, who apparently must by definition be subjugated by their veils and their faith. I can never resist analogies, and felt as if the willingness to bar women from certain public spaces unless they comply with the Republic’s dress code, and the failure to listen to their voices, spoke volumes.

Afterwards, we had lasagne and much less acrimonious discussions until midnight.

Swallows and Amazons

October 26th

Me and Lija are off for a jaunt around the other assistants’ floors with the magical gonflable mattress, because we inexplicably have two weeks of holiday for Toussaint. On Saturday night, I was invited to an end of term party in Corte by Victoria, the only person I have managed to make friends with in Ile Rousse so far. She’s 19, a pagan, and working at my school as a classroom assistant to save money for her psychology degree. I went along with trepidation, but her friends were much more like my friends than the guys we met in Ajaccio with Audrey. They were very friendly and mostly quite geeky, and I had a really nice evening sampling various bizarre concoctions that people had brought along and trying to understand conversations over the music. There was a man in a top hat, smoking a Gandalf style pipe - we started talking about Lord of the Rings and I got to display my geek cred by remembering Tom Bombadil’s name (and his wife’s…I am just too cool…). There was a guy called Kévin, who got increasingly hammered on cannabis-flavoured absinthe and spoke hilarious English. His friends were all pretty agitated because he apparently has stomach ulcers and really shouldn’t drink, but he maintained that he could keep his food down better while pissed. I had a great evening, despite the fact that Victoria fell completely in love and left quite early on, wrapped round a man.

For the next two days we indulged in childish swallows and amazons pleasures with Emily, the English assistant in Corte, who is really lovely and down to earth. Corte is surrounded by mountains, and two rivers join in the town, so you can walk out of town upstream along the gorges. We spent idyllic afternoons eating our sandwiches by the river Restonica, paddling in the freezing water and sunbathing on boulders. The stream was limpid and sunlit and I spent ages watching the shadows of water skippers, where each indentation in the water, made by a foot or proboscis, leaves a round shadow the size of the insect itself so that a whole shoal of them looks like a shifting Rorschach test. While the others were off on another walk I set off along the bank and found myself all alone with the slick green stream, the beech leaves turning golden orange with the sun behind them. Pissing out in the open, balancing rocks one on top of the other in the river, falling asleep in the sun…it was so wholesome, timeless and relaxing.

Three languages

The beach at Ile Rousse is white sand, but as narrow as a street. I kept expecting it to grow at low tide, but then fortuitously listened in on a geography lesson in Corsican and realized that the Mediterranean barely has any tides. Half the classes at my school are bilingual, so they are taught all their subjects in Corsican for the morning, and in French for the afternoon. If you spoke decent Italian (which I don’t) you would be able to understand Corsican, which is like Italian with a bizarre accent and a lot of dialect words. You don’t hear it spoken much in the streets, except by old people. I was talking to one teacher about how he has renounced violent nationalism in favour of the non-violent kind, and he said that it was a shame, because although the Corsican separatist movement keeps the language alive as a political statement, it has become a way to exclude other French people, rather than a positive language.

I realize I haven’t said much about teaching, mostly because it’s very repetitive. I have 12 hours a week, 9 in Ile Rousse, and 3 in the older school in Monticello. I wouldn’t say teaching small children is my vocation, but I enjoy it most days – it is satisfying to see their little faces light up when you explain that rainbows are named after a bow in French and English, because of the shape, or that you hEAR with your EARs. I have no idea if there is an actual etymological connection there, but anyway, they are quite easily impressed, which is soothing after three years of churning out essays for a somewhat more demanding audience.

When I’m teaching, most of the teachers sit in the back of the class and do marking, or wander off to do photocopies, but one woman, Mlle Agostini, likes to teach together. Her class is one of the bilingual ones, so it is a real mental workout for me because I will be speaking English to the kids, trying to use syntax and vocabulary that is closer to French while still being correct, sometimes resorting to French for certain instructions, which annoys Mlle Agostini, and watching the kids to see if they understand. She will then start translating my instructions into Corsican, so I am also listening to her, to check whether she understood the English correctly herself. The children will be asking me questions in French, and asking her questions in French or Corsican, and she will be talking to them in Corsican…she is really very nice, and that class is much better behaved because she is there to keep order, but it is exhausting!

The other day I did a really disastrous lesson with one of the rowdier classes. The idea was that they would draw faces, and then we would play ‘guess who’ by asking things like‘does she have blonde hair?’. Unfortunately they induced pre-teen drama by drawing hideous faces and naming them after their classmates, or in one case calling it ‘débile mentale’, which I don’t think went down too well with the teacher. All the kids think I’m a débile mentale because I can’t write in the French state-approved copperplate. The little ones take hours to even write the date, and they constantly consult their alphabet cards to remember what scrolls and swirls each letter requires. I would have thought that my printing on the board would have been simpler, but apparently not – they invariably have trouble reading it, and Mlle Agostini has taken to re-copying everything on the board for them, which is slightly demoralizing.


The French school system is amazingly regimented, compared to what I remember at primary school: the children all stand up when a teacher comes into the room, a few teachers do quite a lot of shouting and will happily say ‘this whole class is terrible, they are badly brought up, you should just give them a test to do in silence every time.’ Even after several lessons with my lax attitude to penmanship, the children still ask incessantly what colour to write in, because there are obviously strict and invariable rules about it. It only adds to my débile mentale status when I tell them that they can write in felt tip if they want, I couldn’t care less. I think most of them see me as an amusing freak.

I sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud, because I frankly have no clue what I am doing, and just devise my own syllabus according to whatever seems most interesting. But frankly it’s not rocket science and I think the kids mostly enjoy the classes, if only because they don’t do proper work in them (several have explicitly said this to me, in the most charming way possible!). It’s quite touching how affectionate little kids can be – they will say they ‘adore’ English lessons, or come up to me and tell me inconsequential little anecdotes that I don’t fully understand. I think one little boy in the class for kids with learning disabilities absolutely loves me – he always does the bises, even when I am carrying a full tray of food at lunchtime, and just looks so happy in class, and tries so hard. One kid today asked me what ‘good morning’ meant, and seemed bowled over when I told him. ‘Tomorrow, I can say good morning papa!’ he said, and then looked even happier when I reminded him that he had just learnt what papa was in English, and went off muttering ‘good morning dad’. Even when it seems like they aren’t learning much, I think having a happy, encouraging first experience with a foreign language must be doing them some good.

Table dancing

October 19th

We had an unplanned and uncharacteristically eventful weekend. Me and Lija went to stay the night in Calvi, the town just west along the coast from Ile Rousse, with Angela, an Italian assistant. Audrey, the French girl who lives next door to me in the lycée, drove us there and we spent the morning at the school where she teaches English. She is terribly elegant; you would think she worked in PR or fashion, not a run down secondary school – she was wearing black satin peep-toe heels, immaculate black slim trousers and a beige trench coat for classes that day.

It was fun to sample collège teaching after two weeks of trying to convince eight year olds that there really is a difference between ‘how old are you?’ and ‘how are you?’. I felt a bit like a performing monkey, as she just told us to talk about ourselves and English culture, and at one point insisted that we sing something. The only thing we could both remember was jingle bells, which was slightly cringe! Audrey wanted a proper song, and shamefully I don’t actually know any modern songs by heart, so I ended up singing Simon and Garfunkel to a room of bemused thirteen year olds. We also explained trifle and Christmas pudding, which seemed to revolt everyone. I am relieved to be teaching primary, despite the urge to start sniffing the whiteboard markers after the twentieth child fails to correctly tell me where they live. I don’t tend to feel embarrassed in front of the little ones, but once they start thinking they are cool and being surly, I would find a whole class of them a bit intimidating.


We wandered around town with Angela all day, and then went to dinner in a restaurant just outside the walls of the citadel. I ate wild boar stew and crème brulée while three men played Corsican folk songs, and lewd French songs too, and first Angela and then me and Lija ended up being coerced into dancing on the tables - I can only assume because we were the only people there under 45. It was hilarious, totally uncharacteristic for me, and we got free shots of chestnut liqueur which Lija recklessly drank, despite her life-threatening nut allergy, thus confirming Glasgow uni students’ alcoholic reputation! It was a surreal and lovely evening.

The next day we left for Ajaccio, lured/bullied by Audrey’s insistence that we come and ‘faire la fête’ for her boyfriend’s birthday. There was a terrible storm that morning, which became a sandstorm thanks to the Corsican love of sand as an all purpose surface for pavements and town squares, which is perfect for pétanque, but becomes mud in the rain and blinds you in the wind. We managed to get across town to the train, which went a little way along the coast before stopping because of the sand dunes on the tracks. The windows facing the beach gradually dimmed as they were plastered with sand, and we waited about forty minutes until a man in a tracksuit with a tiny spade arrived and scraped some sand off, then got onto the train and told the driver to carry on. The driver didn’t seem convinced, but spade man clearly, and understandably, didn’t fancy getting out into the sandstorm, so we drove very slowly over the sand-drifts, crunching and wobbling along.

The journey to Ajaccio takes over four hours on the train, because there is no direct route along the west coast through the mountains, but we amused ourselves with breadsticks. Then we spent the day with two lovely assistants in Ajaccio, Rae and Julia, who regaled us with amusing and unrepeatable assistant gossip. I realized, meeting certain other assistants, that I’m very lucky with Lija – I really like her, which is a blessed relief given that we are the only English assistants in our town. Ajaccio seems like a huge metropolis after Ile Rousse – there are department stores, and bars that are open all winter!

There was also the tedious drama of finding me something to wear to faire la fête. I hadn’t planned on it, so was in very un-French and un-chic Birkenstocks and a knee-length, flowery skirt. After annoying everyone with my chronic indecision, I bought a tacky pair of heels and some tights, and we went to meet up with Audrey. The sartorial effort was clearly wasted on her very drunk, all male friends, who were very friendly, but enjoyed practicing English gems such as ‘he’s got a big dick’. One of them started taking the piss out of my skirt, shouting out ‘Little House on the Prairie! Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman!’ which was pretty amusing and reflected poorly on the scheduling decisions of French TV executives. He also decided I looked like Dora the Explorer.

We went to a club after the bar, and stayed out until four, although I think the other assistants we had dragged along were slightly traumatized by the experience. I didn’t drink anything, because it was either beer or incredibly expensive cocktails – they don’t go in for cheap drinks deals in the English binge drinking tradition, but managed to enjoy myself anyway. On the way back we got nutella panini instead of kebabs, and Julia and Diana (a Spanish assistant) had a heated debate in English, French and Spanish with a man at the panini van about the merits of nationalist violence.

Pain

October 11th

Patrice, one of the teachers at the lycée, took me and Lija hiking on Sunday with another teacher, Béa. Patrice is tiny, like a thirteen year old, and twitchy, with a drooping eye and manic gestures – he makes me think of some Dickensian character. It was kind of them to bring us along, since we are rather stranded without a car, and it would have been impossible on public transport. The drive there took us through a gorge where the only signs of human life for miles were stunted, rust-red pylons shaped like crucifixes, their arms tipped with green glass disks that glowed with the sun behind them. We came up through a village with pastel-coloured houses and pigs wandering in the streets.

According to the book I’m reading about Corsica (Portrait of a Granite Island by Dorothy Carrington), Diodorus Siculus wrote that in the 4th Century BC the Corsicans would let their animals graze freely in the maquis without fear that they would be stolen. Dorothy theorises that it was because they were so valuable that the retribution would be a bloody vendetta. One of the polyphonic choirs we went to see has a song about a lost goat, and you would think it was a love song – apparently stealing livestock was as serious, in terms of inciting bloody revenge, as raping a woman. Patrice told us that nowadays the animals wander because farmers are paid subsidies to keep them on the high pastures, and once they have collected the cheque, it is cheaper to let them go than to build fences for them. I don’t know how true that is but there are a lot of pigs, goats and cows roaming in the village streets, the chestnut woods and the mountain pastures which seem completely free - I don’t see how their owners would ever gather them in again.

We parked in the woods, at the Fontaine de Caroline, a trickle which apparently gives you diarrhea. It took about an hour to get above the tree line, and I realized how unfit I really am – the others were bounding along while I sweated profusely and started to feel serious pain. The entire four hour hike to the lake was uphill, and then we had to come down the same way, so things didn’t really improve on that front, but the views were worth it. Once out of the beech and pine forest we reached green fields with grazing cows and the sound of cowbells ringing across the valleys. Above that, it was bare rock and ranges of mountains, like a child would draw, trailing down to the sea. There was a hole in the mountain across the valley, you could see the sky through it. After several hours (of pain) we came to a meadow in a bowl of hills, which seemed bizarre after hours of staring at bare rock. There were trees covered in waxy red berries, and the leaves were turning. Coming over a rise, you saw the lake’s tributaries first, like the Amazon from above, snaking through verdant growth, then the lake reflecting the mountains behind. We sat by another trickling fountain and ate the pasta salad and fruit which Patrice had brought. No wonder these people are so healthy – if the catering had been up to me I would have brought industrial quantities of chocolate. Just after we all sat down, a group came down on ponies and galloped picturesquely along the shore.

I have lots of photos which make all this purple prose slightly unnecessary, but never mind.

Corte

The major event of the week was going to Corte for the welcoming meeting for all the Corsican assistants. Corte is the only university in Corsica, so is presumably where all the young people so conspicuously absent in Ile Rousse are lurking. None of us have a car, so we flung ourselves on the mercy of the Corsican public transport system and took the bus. It was mildly disastrous, as it was an hour late, and then we had to change onto a different bus, so a 40 minute journey required one and a half hours of waiting in the chilly early morning streets. But the scenery was incredible - Corte is in the middle of the island, surrounded by mountains, and as we drove inland towards Ponte Leccia we came over a rise into a valley and the whole thing was filled with cloud. The sun was rising and the sky pink, with the trees silhouetted like paper cutouts. Corsica would have been the perfect place for painters to invent aerial perspective - the hills recede green, blue, greyish lilac, it is very beautiful. Then we dipped down into the cloud, and the sun looked like the full moon through the mist, you could only see about twenty yards. It's a strange island, you can see what they mean when they say there's something mystical about it. Anyway, we waited in the freezing mist by a petrol station for half an hour at Ponte Leccia and didn't feel too appreciative, but the bus came eventually.

Our actual briefings were fairly unhelpful, lots of information about the structure of the French school system and an introduction to the yawning chasm between the syllabus for English and what the students actually manage to learn. Having spoken to Lija, the other English assistant in Ile Rousse, it sounds as if her lycée students are yet to master most of the primary school syllabus. They seem to want us to skim over everything so fast that the students won’t retain anything, but so that they will be able to say they have studied it. I’ve already run into this in my classes – they claim to know the days of the week, so I smilingly ask them to tell me, and everyone goes silent. Nevertheless, it was good to meet the other assistants in Corsica, for future long weekends away. We walked up to the citadel and looked out into the mountains; it looks like I imagine Switzerland, not Mediterranean at all.

On the way back to the station I had a cédrat icecream, which I think is called citron in English – it’s a lumpy citrus fruit about the size of a pineapple, with thick peel that they candy. We got lost, and I asked a woman with a baby the way to the station, and she walked us there. We talked for about twenty minutes, about Corte and her experience of Corsican racism (she is Moroccan), and I was really happy to actually manage a real conversation with someone. She worked in hotels, so I think she was used to English tourists, and was speaking very clearly for me.

Small people

October 8th

Finished my first week of teaching – I think it is going alright, considering that I have no experience and have been given no real guidance or materials by the schools.

I haven’t spent time around children for a long while, and I’d forgotten how they are – even quite simple instructions in French sometimes seem lost on them, they whine incessantly if they don’t all get a turn, and the youngest ones need reassurance and praise all the time. Most of the classes are mixed ages, which is particularly hard with the youngest ones – I have classes with six to ten year olds in, and engaging the bright oldest ones without losing the slowest little ones is impossible. If I give them worksheets, which works fairly well to calm them down and get them concentrating, they will unfailingly call me over individually (I answer to many names – maitresse, teacher, Rosanna, Virginia…) and ask if they can write in pen, in blue, in pink, in felt tip, do they need to write the date, can they colour in the pictures, can they use felt tips to do so... It’s endearing, but exhausting! I think the lack of initiative is due to a combination of the French school system, which really emphasizes identical copperplate handwriting and using the correct colour pen for date (blue, underlined in red), then leaving the correct space and margin for the subject (red, underlined in red) and the title (blue, underlined in blue), and a child’s natural urge for praise and conformity. I remember all those crippling anxieties I felt as a small child about the tiniest things, and the need for reassurance from teachers, so I try to be understanding.

The perks of working with little ones are not lost on me though…much more encouraging than surly teenagers - they do get so enthusiastic, and even if they aren’t learning very much it is sweet when they see me in the supermarket and come and say hello or tell their parents ‘that’s my English teacher!’ as if I’m some rare breed. Two little girls came over today purely to do the bises with me, which was the first time I’ve done it with kids. It takes a lot of getting used to, especially with children, because your child protection alert sirens go off, but it’s obviously perfectly normal here. I’ve already offended and/or amused several teachers who moved in for the kisses by ducking out of the way! It’s an involuntary reaction – my brain doesn’t compute in time what is happening, so I think I’m in their way and just back off. It’s quite embarrassing, particularly as it is still very hot here and I’m always bathed in sweat, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to deter them. Tu and vous is another predictable minefield, because I assumed that I could just play it safe by using vous, but the younger teachers look sort of jokily offended and say ‘Oh no, I’m not that old, you can use tu with me!’. Then I forget who has told me to tutoyer, and revert to vous, and duck when they try to kiss me. They are being friendly and tolerant with me, despite my social and linguistic ineptitude.

The lion's eyes

September 30th

Had a lovely day today, ignoring the issue of planning lessons for my first proper day of work tomorrow. Me and Rafaël got up early and walked up the hill behind the town to a tiny village called Occhiglioni. It means the lion's eyes, because of the view, but also inspired private 'eye of the tiger' motivational humming while tramping up the steep hill. We followed a track up through the maquis, rocky from the dry stone walls on either side which were gradually melting back into the ground. There are abandoned shepherds’ huts all along the way, and no sign of sheep except for a hoof in the middle of the path. The maquis smells incredible – it is all herbs, apart from the stunted holm oaks with their strange leaves like holly, and olive trees. No wonder Corsica was so poor for so long, when it seems so hard to make the land produce anything other than a nice bouquet garni.

Occhiglioni had a leather workshop and a beautiful view, but no café, so we walked along the road to Santa Reparata and had cold drinks on a terrace looking down to the sea. There was a big chestnut-coloured bird of prey wheeling on the thermals below us, and I tried vaguely to understand while Rafaël talked about how some languages are more suited to epic than others, and how he is composing his own epic fantasy novel about the magic of insects. Not fully understanding anyone lends everything a slightly surreal quality. I don’t feel like myself, communicating completely in a second language I barely speak with someone new – there are so many linguistic avenues blocked off, and all the verbal tics and subtleties you use in your first language are lost. We were feeling lazy, so hitched down the hill with a friendly Parisian couple, and then I happily reabsorbed all the calories burned on the walk with a coffee éclair.

The rest of the day wasn't quite so lovely, but I need various things to be fixed in my room, so I found the janitor and managed to understand his letchy comments about how he might walk in on me naked in the shower by accident, and had a stab at French 'banter' while refraining from actual physical violence. So that was linguistic progress, if not feminist.

Calvi

September 27th


Rafaël and I went off to Calvi for the day, which is about 45 minutes away on the train, west along the coast. It is disorienting, knowing literally nothing about a place’s history – I am very dependent on wikipedia, and there is no internet here! Anyway, Calvi is beautiful – a long beach with huge mountains behind, and an old citadel rising out of the bay. I always feel like I’m hallucinating when mountains are involved – I’m just so unused to seeing them in Cambridge that they seem bizarre. We had pizza in the port and walked around the citadel in the baking heat, just being lazy and speaking dodgy French to each other. He spent a year studying in Toulouse so knows a lot of slang, and understands what people are saying, but his accent is really impenetrable. I am getting very good at conducting whole conversations without understanding 80% of what someone is saying.

Polyphony

September 26th

There is an unexpected Spanish assistant at the lycée called Rafaël, who wasn’t on any of the contact lists we were sent before arriving. We went off to the sailing club where I signed up, and learned that the previous assistant went out with the instructor there. I feel slightly as if I am reliving the book Rebecca here, without the rhododendrons. The children call me Virginia, which was the previous assistant’s name, and I can’t see myself ever becoming adept enough at French café banter to find a huge crowd of friends like she and the other assistant apparently did, let alone a boyfriend, assuming I were looking for one.

That evening we decided to squeeze the last drops out of Ile Rousse’s cultural teat before it shrivels up for winter, and went to a polyphonic Corsican choir concert. Rafaël was completely shocked by the idea of a concert in a church, which apparently doesn’t happen in Spain. It was atmospheric – the altar statue of the crowned Virgin in a glass box was lit up in white, and the four singers lit in red from below, like Heaven and Hell. It wasn’t particularly traditional, and I wasn’t too keen on the electric guitar with echo effect, although the Corsican wild boar version of ‘the lion sleeps tonight’ was quite funny, but some of the more traditional songs were incredible. The singers gather into a clump with their arms around one another, holding their ears like anxious babies. There was one main singer, who will start out alone like a muezzin, and then the others add in strange harmonies, too close to pick apart.

Ego bruising

September 25th


The woman who is my ‘responsable’ came to meet me today and took me round the two schools I’ll be working in – one very modern, named after Albert Camus, on the outskirts of Ile Rousse, and the other much older, named after a headmistress who worked there for 30 years, perched on a hill in Monticello, a village about six kilometers away from Ile Rousse. I got my timetable (12 hours of teaching a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays) and briefly met all the teachers. The kids at least look endearing, and said hello in English when they spotted me having lunch at the lycée.

My ego is slightly bruised from speaking my toddler-level French all day and looking like an idiot generally – sweating a lot, failing to work out the paranoid button entry system in the bank, repeatedly trying to get into the driver’s side of cars… My patented 'surprisingly good accent; no actual French vocabulary' thing is becoming a problem – almost everyone I have met has exclaimed ‘oh, but you speak French so well’, and then become confused when I didn’t understand anything else they said. A particular linguistic highpoint was not understanding the word ‘quand’ today with the school secretary – she became slightly frantic, appealing to everyone in the office: ‘quand! quand! cest quoi quand en anglais?!’ before I realized that she wasn’t actually saying ‘CON’.

Being whisked around

September 23rd

Catherine, a friend of my friend Sam’s parents, strangely happens to have been born very near to where I’m living. She works in Paris now, but came back to look for locations for a film which she is directing about Marie Mattei, a nineteenth century Corsican heroine who lived in the little village up the hill from Ile Rousse, invented a false identity and gallivanted around Europe with various famous lovers. Catherine is a force of nature, long red hair flying everywhere, very warm and dynamic and sometimes slightly intimidating!

She whisked me off with her to drive around in the hills, where we met a horse trainer and his friendly, reeking collection of dogs, then drove back to a very swanky hotel bar in Ile Rousse for macaroons and green tea with a man who owns some land with ancient olive trees (I washed off the dog hair in the space age toilets), and then back into the hills to see the villages as the sun set. It was so kind of her to take the time, especially since, two months later, that is still the first and only time I’ve made it to the further villages, as it’s impossible without a car. I am still completely lost when people speak French. It is like being a child again; everything just washes over you and your attention drifts as you concoct fanciful versions of what the grown-ups mean.

The light here is strangely hazy, it makes everything seem unreal. Part of that is from the Corsican habit of constantly burning things (damp autumn leaves, rubbish of all kinds) in the streets, so that on still days you look out into the hills behind the town and see the smoke hanging in the valleys like that heavy vapour from dry ice. But even without the smoke, the light is strange. That evening, Catherine took me up to San Antonino, a tiny village. The fields around it were golden red in the sunset and black and white sheep flocked around a little extra-mural cemetery with white walled, black roofed family tombs. We watched the sun set over Calvi’s citadel from an empty beach where the landscape was even more unreal: mountains on the horizon that seem lit by a different light, colder as if seen through mist, towering clouds in pink and lilac, and the lights flicking on in the villages.

Arriving

September 22nd

After flying into Bastia and spending a drunken evening with a very friendly English teacher there, I caught the decrepit little train to Ile Rousse. It is a lovely journey through broad valleys inland, and then out onto the coast where the track skirts the flanks of the hills in looping folds. The train stops for the beautiful cows that seem to wander freely onto the track to stare at the train through their film star lashes. They are bright chestnut orange, like mangoes in the sunshine. You can see the harbour of Ile Rousse from a long way off, with the island and its Genoese tower built from the same orange rock, so that it looks as if it’s part of the hill.

Once the train arrived, I toiled up the wrong hill in Ile Rousse with my huge case and rucksack and had to retrace my steps, eventually finding the lycée and scaring the admin staff with my copious sweating and inability to understand French. My first hint that I was on the right track for the school was some graffiti written on a wall in tippex: “Si la merde était de l’or, le collège serait un trésor.’ I’m hoping that my primary students won’t yet have reached that level of cynicism.

My room was small, damp and contained some mouse droppings, and I felt a bit lost, particularly since the secretaries left without telling me about where or when the canteen might be, or that there was a code to open the school gates at night (I ended up having to climb over a couple of times). The lycée is about a kilometre out of town up a hill, next to the college and a cemetery. In the evenings it was slightly frightening, completely empty and silent, except for a few teachers who for some reason choose to live there, and who all turn their lights off very early.

Ile Rousse has a tiny old centre with two churches, the main square, a market like a Greek temple and about six little streets. The view out to sea is lovely: receding hills and spits of land out to the east, where you can see the ridge of the Cap Corse hazy in the distance. All the rest is new blocks of flats stretching up from the sea into the hills. There is building work everywhere, and apparently most of the flats are empty all winter, waiting for the tourist crush. I went exploring out the back of the lycée in the cool of the evening, and found a dirt track alongside a field with scrawny sheep with bells on, making a noise like boats at harbour when the wind knocks the ropes against the metal masts. Not a proper country walk really – it’s a dead end and apparently well loved by fly-tippers, but there is a patch of maquis that smells of thyme and rosemary burning, where I sat and read in the sun.

Blogtacular

I’m writing this while sitting in my new Corsican flat on a revolting silver fake-leather beanbag with my feet hanging out of the window to get the last of the wintry sunshine. There are two little trees outside which screen my windows from the square – I’m not good on tree names, but one has big leaves like laurels, starting to turn yellow, and little white cones of flowers at the tip of each branch, starting to turn brown. The other tree is evergreen, maybe a fir. Its leaves look like those plastic trees you get on model railways: flat, improbably lurid green and seaweed-like. The flowery tree is covered in bees, the fir in cobwebs lit up by the sun.

I’m going on and on about trees because Ile Rousse is really not an eventful place in winter, or at least I haven’t yet managed to infiltrate whatever social scene there is – all that is visible on the surface is endless geriatric pétanque games in Place Paoli. Things are tricky without a car, because the public transport is patchy, slow and infrequent (the whole south of the island has no railways, for example), I don’t have internet access very often, and I really need something to do – so…I’m starting this blog (groan) in case any of you (my several lovely friends!) were wondering what I’m doing wandering off to Corsica for seven months. I’m enjoying it so far, despite that little whine – thankfully it’s not as if nightlife is my thing. I’m just going to rehash/poncify some emails to get up to date so far.